Valentine's Day Cupcake Craziness

Our Valentine's Day was absolutely crazy (in a good way) this year! We delivered cupcakes to benefit our adoption and it kept me quite busy. On Monday morning I was able to go to Faith's Valentine party and then I hit the ground running. I baked 12 dozen cupcakes or so. I made vanilla, chocolate, & red velvet. I also made frosting and decorations. We delivered two cupcakes in a decorative box for $10. We also delivered kid packs that included an eraser, pencils, stickers, & a cupcake balloon for $5. We did over 28 deliveries. Jeremy came home from work early to help with deliveries. I also squeezed in attending an assembly Grace was in and her Valentine party that afternoon. I literally fell asleep on the couch at 8 o'clock that night. Not such a great Valentine for my hubbie. But, he didn't mind too much since we raised $500 for our adoption!!! Hooray!

Each box included a vanilla cupcake with pink buttercream and a chocolate fondant heart. It also had a chocolate cupcake with chocolate icing and a peanut butter heart dipped in white chocolate. We got lots of great feedback and are hoping to do this again next year.
Happy Valentine's day Humiston family- I loved our crazy cupcake day! And can't wait till we celebrate as an entire family some day. (maybe with cupcakes just for us)

Something old becomes new.

A few Christmases ago the kids got an easel. I can say it did not get nearly enough love when it was down in the playroom. I actually really disliked it in the play room. The chalk would get scattered all over and ground in the carpet or the lids would get left off the dry eraser markers and that would be their demise. It just didn't work. When we did our house shuffle we ran out of room in the girls' room and there was no way Titus was getting something he could use to mark on the walls with in his room. So I decided to bring it into our kitchen. (We had previously tried having the kids' little kitchen in my kitchen but it wasn't working out well either so I moved it down to the girls' room.)

I can officially say the easel has found a wonderful new home! The kids love drawing on it when I am cooking. Grace practices words. They draw. I occasionally leave Grace surprise notes while she is at school which she loves to see if she can read. Did I mention the draw for hours? Its wonderful. We also got some dry erase crayons which we are REALLY loving. (no lids to worry about!)

I LOVE when something old becomes new and wonderful again. This toy was in the danger zone of ending up in our next yard sale and now its our new favorite!

Making Valentine's Cards

This year for Valentine's day we decided to make our own Valentine cards from materials we had on hand. The girls both had a nasty virus the week before with a fever that lasted 5 days so it gave us some time during their bursts of energy to work on them. We started with cupcake liners. (I happen to have a whole supply of these that I buy in bulk for my business) We dyed them two different colors to make the flowers.

Faith did a lot of the dyeing while Grace wrote all the names of her classmates on hers.

I had printed the message "Bee My Valentine" on card stock. We had lots of pipe cleaners and pom poms on hand which worked great for the center/stem of the flower. We also found enough different bee stickers from our sticker collection to add them.
We even sprayed them with some perfume so they smelled good.
Overall the project was a success, however for next year we purchased some Valentine's at 75% off. Much simpler and Grace was feeling a little too different from all her classmates.